Indice dei contenuti per July 2023 in Readers Digest Australia

Vegetarian Gladiators The story on Kangaroos (‘When Kangaroos Attack’, May) is fascinating, incisive and reveals their confrontationist behavioural patterns. Though kangaroos are placid grazing animals, they can be aggressive. Red kangaroos could earn martial arts belts with their bone-shattering kicks, said to deliver 350 kilograms of force. Kangaroos are also stronger than humans, having a punch force of about 125 kilograms. Kangaroos are ‘vegetarian gladiators’ and can grapple forcefully with their forearms. RIFAQUAT ALI Meeting Pope Francis The interview with the Pope is unique – it is an insight into the ‘private’ thinking of the Pope (May). I was present at the great papal audience in Rome and was thus allowed to shake the pope’s hand personally. He squeezed it firmly and I felt his courage pass over to me. I…

YOU MIGHT HAVE HEARD IT IN CONVERSATION WHEN A RELATIVE JOKES ABOUT BEING ‘A BIT OCD’. PERHAPS YOU’VE SPOTTED IT IN A PARENTING FACEBOOK GROUP WHEN CONCERNED PARENTS RUSH TO TELL A WORRIED MUM THAT HER SON’S BEHAVIOURS SOUND LIKE ADHD. Maybe you’ve noticed it in the comments section of viral social media posts about autism, anxiety or bipolar, with numerous people chiming in claiming to tick all of the boxes. These days, labelling is everywhere. It can be helpful for people who have never quite been able to put a finger on why they feel the way they do. But haphazardly using these terms to describe yourself or others, with little understanding of what these conditions actually are or how people experience them, is problematic – and it seems…

Coffee Combo The task of building a mosaic of ancient Egyptian Pharaoh King Tutankhamun’s mask took a group of dedicated youths almost 12 hours. The mosaic was pieced together in December 2019 using 7260 paper cups of coffee in the yard of the Grand Egyptian Museum, near the Great Pyramids of Giza. The different shades of the mask were achieved by adding varying amounts of milk to each cup of coffee. A whopping 60 square metres, the mosaic set a new Guinness World Record for the largest coffee-cup mosaic portrait, a title previously held by a portrait of Elvis Presley.…

Buckle Up After years of putting money into a savings account, a wife tells her husband the good news: “We’ve finally got enough money to buy what we started saving for in 1979.” Her husband smiles with giddy excitement. “You mean a brand-new car?” he asks. “No,” says the wife. “A 1979 model.” Asktrim.com Picturing It A lawyer representing a wealthy art collector called his client and said to him, “Saul, I have some good news and I have some bad news.” Saul replied, “I’ve had a bad day; let’s hear the good news first.” The lawyer said, “Well, I met with your wife today, and she informed me that she invested $5000 in two pictures that she thinks will bring a minimum of $15-20 million. I think she could…

In One Ear… I’m a paramedic. I once responded to a man complaining of an insect crawling into his right ear. But more bothersome was the burning sensation in his left ear. That’s when we noticed his wife holding a bottle of insect spray. Turns out, she had sprayed insecticide into his left ear thinking it would ‘flush’ the insect out of his right ear. I had to explain to her that our ear canals are separated by our brain. Reddit.com Sealed With A Kiss A relative of mine, a minister, once performed a wedding ceremony in a car. The pair were too old and frail to get out, so he got on his knees in the front seat and turned to them in the back. After declaring them husband…

The eyes of the crowd are on Zaid Ait Malek as he takes his place at the starting line. Wild-haired and wiry, he clowns around with fellow competitors, but then, as the race countdown begins, Zaid falls silent, staring straight ahead. “Ten, nine….” The 38-year-old mountain runner visualises how he’ll handle the course’s challenges, when he will push, when he’ll hold back. Zaid touches his fingers together in prayer. God protect us all and return us safely. The way Zaid approaches this run – the Calamorro Skyrace in March 2022 – is the way he approaches life. Faith, resilience and joy have helped him navigate the journey from Moroccan stowaway, to Spanish sports hero, to husband and father. But his focus right now is the start of this 27-kilometre run…

You’ve probably seen your cat curled up taking a nap in patches of sunlight at all hours of the day. Cats spend a lot of their time sleeping – on average 12 to 15 hours – and it’s not because they’re lazy. We know that dogs dream, but do cats dream, too? And what kinds of things would cats dream about, anyway? DO CATS DREAM? “Research has shown that all mammals dream. During sleep, the mammalian brain needs to organise and arrange images from the day,” says Dr Katy Nelson, a veterinarian. “Scientists have concluded through studying rats’ brains that the level of brain activity while doing puzzles or navigating mazes is similar to the activity level measured during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep – the deepest level of sleep…

News helicopters flew low over Drs Riley Elliott and Ocean Ramsey in an effort to film the crazy rescue the pair were attempting in the waters just south of Perth, Western Australia. It was April 2014 and the two marine biologists were frantically swimming alongside a dying shark in an effort to revive it. What made the dramatic rescue even more unusual was the fact that it was taking place during a shark cull. There had been seven lethal great white shark attacks over the previous three years off Western Australian beaches. The public wanted something done and permission had been given for a three-month shark-cull trial targeting sharks longer than three metres. The larger animals were to be hooked using massive hooks on baited drumlines then killed, while…

“HI, VANESSA! NICE TO SEE YOU!” It feels good to hear those words when I see people I know. But I take it for granted that I have even heard that greeting – and, in fact, all other sounds. I never think about how I’m hearing things, how my brain is translating sounds into meaning. Yet the process is fascinating. The journey of a sound from outside the ear and into the brain, which takes only milliseconds, is mind-bendingly elaborate. First, the sound waves enter each ear and vibrate the paper-thin eardrum. That vibration moves two small bones that sit behind it, which begin to dance in sync with the sound waves’ vibrations. Then a third bone sitting against the cochlea starts to vibrate, and things get really interesting. The…

The elderly man sits facing me, his arms resting on the upholstered sides of a pale blue club chair. He’s not moving. I am standing a metre or so away beneath a round flat silver flying saucer-like disc. A circle of bright blue light on the underside of the disc is carefully aligned above my head. “Good morning, Eddie,” I say, feeling rather uncomfortable and not a little weird as I am talking to an image of Eddie projected onto a black screen. Eddie looks at me for a long couple of seconds. His facial features begin to move, his eyes sparkle and he returns my greeting. Holocaust survivors Eddie Jaku, Olga Horak (nee Rosenberger) and Yvonne Engelman subjected themselves to a week of intense interviews to create the recordings…

Crossword Test your general knowledge. ACROSS 1 Injured one (8)5 Mexican holiday destination (6)10 Fencing moves (7)11 Old pals’ get-together (7)12 To a small degree (9)13 Blue dye (4)16 Gets back (7)18 Rare plants (7)19 Amusingly ironic (3)20 Generally (2,1,4)22 Quite large (7)24 Germany’s former currency (4)25 Travel schedule (9)29 Impresario’s goal? (4,3)30 Lithuanian capital (7)31 Heavy hammer (6)32 In which Jud Fry dies (8) DOWN 1 Intersects (4)2 Rising suddenly (7)3 Like a double rainbow, maybe (10)4 Where the Owl and the Pussycat went (2,3)6 Border (4)7 Tuscan wine (7)8 Completely puzzled (10)9 Hospital conveyances (8)14 Running machines (10)15 Neopolitan buffalo cheese (10)17 Result of using 14 Down, perhaps (8)21 Place in order (7)23 Tortilla meal (7)26 Kim ---, of Vertigo (5)27 To boast (4)28 30% of the Earth’s…

We bought a bush block near Braidwood, New South Wales, in the 1970s after good rain. It hadn’t been touched for years and we loved it. It was a huge tangle of fallen trees and thick undergrowth. Tea trees and long grass hung over the creek that ran through the property. We thought it was pristine bush and for our five children it was heaven. They built cubby houses, climbed trees and built dams in the creek. However, as the 1982 drought began to bite, we became increasingly worried. The place was a powder keg waiting for a spark. A thick layer of dried leaves crackled underfoot and the creek became a series of small pools. The long strips of bark hanging from the ribbon gums rattled in the westerly…

More Haste, Less Speed I was running late for my flight and trying to get through security when the agent asked me to remove my jacket. I whispered to my friend, “That was covering up my coffee stain.” The older woman behind me in line made me feel better about my sloppiness when she said, “Don’t worry about the coffee stain, dear. Your shirt’s on inside out and backwards.” SUBMITTED BY SUSAN SHAFER Pecking Order Just before our chemistry exam, my two friends bet on who would do better. The one with the worse grade would owe the other one 14 chicken sandwiches. “There’s no way I’ll lose this bet,” said my first friend. “This test is heavy in maths, and I always do well in maths problems.” My other…

As children we’re told not to talk to strangers. But now you’re an adult, it’s time to forget that, because having a chat with someone you don’t know could change your whole day It could be said that everything we know about the power of chatting to a stranger started with a hot dog lady. Dr Gillian Sandstrom was a young doctorate student studying in Canada, when she’d regularly visit a hot dog stand on the university campus. Over time, she and the woman who worked on the hot dog stand stuck up a connection. “I started nodding and smiling at the lady and, when she responded, even just that small connection made me feel seen, safe and part of the campus community at a time when I was pretty…

Spring 1900: A group of sponge divers slow their boat off the coast of a small Greek island, Antikythera, while they wait for favourable winds to take them on to North Africa. In the downtime, Elias Stadiatis decides to dive where they are moored. After descending about 45 metres, the seafloor comes into his view. What he sees there startles him back to the surface, where his bewildered colleagues listen in disbelief as he describes a scene of rotting corpses. Thinking Stadiatis is either drunk or suffering from the ‘bends’, Captain Dimitrios Kondos puts on his diving gear and goes down to have a look for himself. He quickly resurfaces with a human arm made in bronze, from what turned out to be a pile of statues from, presumably, an…